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Maria Sole Continiello Neri, Research Fellow at the Centre of Comparative Law, Faculty of Law, shared how her academic work is related to current challenges in human rights protection, and how close collaboration with colleagues on teaching helps to build research connections.

Natalia Lyskova is spending her 2nd year as a postdoc at HSE Faculty of Physics working in a Joint Department of Space Physics with the Space Research Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The HSE Look talked to her about the ongoing research and upcoming plans.

Where and how nuclear waste should be buried? What ethical principles should govern autonomous cars? These and similar questions all fall in the realm of technology assessment – an area of knowledge that appeared in the 1950s and has since gained significant prominence. On December 5, Dr Armin Grunwald from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology came to HSE to give a talk on this topical issue.

Book chapter

Traditional and cognitivist approaches are not mutually exclusive. The first may help to clarify the actual or attributed to human differences and the second helps to explain how these differences are becoming increasingly important weight in specific contexts. They can not be seen as contradictory, but as directed mostly to different questions: one - in fact, as the thoughts and groups are created and maintained "folk sociology" and the other - on the functioning of groups in practical cooperation. In this case, even primordialism in understanding the nation appears quite cognitivist - not naturalistic analysis, and analysis of naturalization: that participants and analysts are not real primordialists as treat ethnicity as naturally given and unchangeable.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by the sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. It is argued that the rise of political nationalism since the late 1980s can be explained by development of cultural nationalism in the previous decades, as an unintended outcome of communist nationalities policy. Soviet political and cultural nationalism is studied in historical and comparative perspective. All ethnic regions are examined throughout entire history of the Soviet Union (49 regions, 1917-91), using the structural equation modeling approach. This paper aims to make at least three contributions in the field. Firstly, it is a methodological contribution for studying nationalism: a ‘quantification of history’ approach. Quantitative values are assigned to historical trends and events. Having constructed variables from historical data, I use conventional statistical methods like SEM. Secondly, this paper contributes to the theoretical debate about the role of cultural autonomy in multiethnic states. The results rethink the notion of ‘cultural autonomy’ as solution of interethnic conflict. Cultural nationalism matters, it indirectly reinforces political nationalism. In both cases concessions in the cultural domain has not stopped the growth of political nationalism in the late 1980-s. Finally, the paper statistically proves that the break between early Soviet and Stalinist nationalities policy explains the entire Soviet nationalities policy. In fact, the late Soviet nationalities policy was inherited from the Stalin’s rule period. This finding revealed in other studies now gets statistical evidence

In March 2011 scholars met in Prague at the conference Interculturalism, Meaning and Identity. This event revitalised this important theme related to Diversity and Recognition. The terms 'interculturalism' and 'integration' are experiencing a renaissance. As the extent of human movement between nations increases attempts are made to balance cultural difference and social cohesion. In some contexts immigration and settlement policies are becoming more draconian in response. Because of this, interculturalism can take on many meanings. However, pivotal to the way interculturalism is understood is identification. As the relationship between nation, ethnicity and language becomes more complex so too do the ways in which people represent them selves. The cultural resources drawn on and the processes used to form identities are examined in this truly international collection. So too are the implications of these developments for how we theorise culture, meaning and identity.

In this paper we introduce distinction between “ontologically non-fregean” logics and “pragmatically non-fregean” ones; by means of such distinction a classification of non-fregean logics is presented as well. We believe that NFL must be considered as a many-leveled structure; each level taken separately may vary in different way – from classical to non-classical. It is not these levels themselves that we should call “fregean” or “non-fregean”, but the ways they are stuck together within the whole system. The more levels a system has, the more kinds of “fregean” and “non-fregean” we can find in it.

The article analyzes documentation management as a cultural practice and institution through which university professors’ corporations in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century lost their autonomy, acquiring instead a bureaucratic identity and ethics of state service. The study draws on official documents from university archives of Kazan, Moscow and Kharkov, and the archive of the Ministry of Education (St. Petersburg). It focuses on changes in the language of university record keeping, describing the self-identification matrices of professors as well as the growing role of quantitative and standardized information about university life they had to provide in their reports.

The article in form of a dispute discusses the issues dealt with in the article by M.V. Chekmarev and A.S. Chuprov, published in the magazine Society and Authority. In the author's opinion mass society and market economy gave birth to society, which is a matter-of-fact realization of the great Enlightenment humanism project. As a result in context of marketization a transformation of core values of traditional culture took place. The world has entered a new modality of existence - the modality of possibility.

The aim of the paper is to proceed from surface judgments to more thorough knowledge of what is happening to social history today. The study delineates emergent research fields and subject matters of the recent social history and traces the development of the subdiscipline’s conceptual framework and its main categories. Both cognitive and institutional aspects of social history’s current condition are analyzed (e.g. loss of leadership, the scholarly community lacking a “midpoint” notwithstanding the numerous journals, associations, and old academic elite still persisting).

The paper treats the issue of identity of the ego, which constitutes the central problem of personology. The skeptical approach to this problem, which sees it as not being subject to be resolved by means of science, began with D. Hume's work. Contemporary personologists (P. Ricoeur and others) approach this problem through study of culture, which imparts the ego with «narrative identity». Cultural historic psychology is a «Bridge of interpretations», upon which philosophy of culture meets psychology, and psychological data associated with «personality» are interpreted on the basis of some specific cultural philosophic theory. The «conflict of interpretations» plays and essential role in personology, which participates in the processes of emergence and overcoming of the cultural crisis. Philosophical and methodological problems that define the near term perspective development of personology are formulated: whether there are any «ego invariants» that remain regardless of any possible cultural determination; whether the ego possesses any rigidity in relation to cultural determination and, if it does, what is the nature of this rigidity; whether ego identity is destroyed when cultural determination diminishes or ceases, etc.

This paper investigates the language situation in Moscow schools with an ethnocultural component – a new form of national schools. The analysis is based on interviews which were recorded in 2007, in two Moscow schools, one of them with Armenian ethno-cultural component, and the other, with Azeri. The sample included ten students from each school (five boys and five girls).

In the paper the process of linguistic integration of Azeri and Armenian children into modern Russian society is analyzed. The comparison between these two groups is particularly appealing, because the effects of Soviet Russification, and the language situations in general, were different in Armenia and in Azerbaijan. I show that this difference influences the use of language by Azeri and Armenian children.

In article features of national and confessional self-identification of the Russian youth as parts of the title nation are considered. Ethnic and national consciousness are analyzed as significant components of process of individual and group self-identification. Research covers the studying and working youth which is arrived and which initially living in the city. The youth is the object which studying allows to predict regularities of social development in the future. Consideration of a problem considers multi-confessional, multi-ethnic and boundary in the geographical relation character of Ural as region. The emphasis is placed on specifics of behavior of representatives of title nation, as youth considerably defining a social portrait. The concept of the big city is used as steady, allocated with a number of characteristic features. Authors establish the reasons of the reduced interest to a religious and ethnic identification of with group at the young people belonging to different social groups and united by residence in the large city. The conditions necessary for an intensification of process of identification are defined. Means of updating of processes of formation of identity of youth are offered.

Eremenko M., Crudu E. In bk.: Portraying the Other in International Relations. Cases of Othering, Their Dynamics and the Potential for Transformation. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Ch. 1. P. 3-17.

This chapter proposes an unfolding view of the EU as a sort of post-modern neo-medieval empire, in which narratives of othering towards Central and Eastern Europe preserve their salience.